“Use words. Not your body”: The hunger that has no name

This essay examines the competing readings of food refusal that emerged from a student hunger strike held at Columbia University in fall 2007. The invisibility of the act of food refusal forces hunger strikers to adopt performance strategies that make their (non)action visible as protest. To make the politics of their food refusal legible, advocates for the hunger strike promoted their actions as part of a 40 year tradition of student protest. However, that same invisibility allowed the protest's detractors to deride the hunger strikers as anorexic. At the center of the protest and the commentary about it was a wasting female body that confused for spectators the line between the political and the pathological. Attention to this body raises questions of how community is created and disciplined through performative acts, how easily female protest is evacuated of political meaning and the uneasy role of whiteness in popular attention to anorexia.     

Discourse of decency: white nationalists,white antiracists,and the criminality of color

Contemporary research on white racial attitudes on race and crime reflect a grouping of opinions on a traditional liberal-conservative scale. These two groupings reflect what sociologists and political scientists call ‘issue constraint’ or a ‘clustering’ of ideas into a specific ideological worldview. Many now argue this gulf is growing; a white ‘culture war’ that many interpret as evidence of the increasing fracturing and political bifurcation of white racial identities over ‘hot button’ topics like race and crime. While a substantial literature on race and crime finds white racial attitudes to vary by educational level and political orientation, we know less about shared understandings of crime and race in relation to the processes of white racial identity formation. Rather than view attitudinal statements on race and crime as accurate reflections of essential different and static white racial political positions or ideological orientations, additional scholarship can examine discourse on crime and race as constitutive of the white identities that wield them. Drawing from an ethnographic study with conservative white nationalists and liberal white antiracists, this paper addresses the following question: what is the relationship between discourse on crime and race and the ongoing process of white racial identity formation?     

You’ve got to fight to be white: the rural foundation of the new militia for race control

In this paper, we situate the recent rise of racialized and often violent political discourse within a framework of a class-based conception of nature and property. In this theoretical work, we contribute to thinking about how Whites are racially constituted by showing how an understanding of whiteness among the far right is significantly linked to narratives surrounding rural spaces as havens of individualism and in sharp contrast to the perceived multiculturalism of the city. In developing our argument, we utilize public statements made by Ted Nugent as observable examples of this far-right, violent, and racialized rhetoric. We argue that the far right is able to create a common ground with moderate conservatives around a shared understanding of rural places as embodiments of virtuous white culture, private property, and individualism. This politicized whiteness project, we argue, helps to galvanize and strengthen a conservative coalition while simultaneously pulling their collective ideology further to the right.     

Dancing with Difference: Hugh Tracey on and in (African) Music

Hugh Tracey (1903–1977) founded the International Library of African Music (ILAM) and is well known for his recordings of traditional African music. This paper examines Tracey’s written representations of African music and of the musical interactions involved in the formation of his archive, finding contradictory repressive and collaborative elements in his work and an ambiguous stance toward musical difference. In doing so, it reveals Tracey’s implication in racialized colonial and apartheid power structures and challenges the celebratory view of him as a champion of indigenous culture.     

Visual representation,editorial power,and the dual ‘othering’ of black men in the South African gay press: The case of Gay Pages

Abstract

This article considers some of the ways in which black gay men are marginalised within the queer community and have limited ‘visibility’ in mainstream queer visual culture. The formation of a minority within a minority (or the ‘other’ Other) is ultimately what the article sets out to expose. Thus, we argue that images of black gay men are far less ubiquitous than, for example, those of white, male and middle-class gay men. In order to illustrate this, a purposive sample from the South African gay men's lifestyle magazine Gay Pages is considered and critiqued. We argue that the visual mode of Gay Pages gives the impression of promoting a hegemonic gay male identity. This identity appears to be ‘natural’, but is in fact one-sided and stereotypical, as are most cultural constructions and representations. The narrow and limited representation of gay men endorses an exclusive, homogenous and inaccurate portrait of the queer constituency (in the minds of heterosexual and gay South Africans alike) and suggests the question that leads this investigation: If ‘belonging’ is articulated through the consumption of queer culture, what then of those queers who do not fit the ‘mould’ standardised by mainstream gay print media? This exploration of queer visual media deals not only with that which is frequently represented (white homomasculinity), but also, more significantly, with that which is not (black homomasculinity).     

Race and a decolonial turn in development studies

Abstract

This paper reviews and revives a longstanding conversation about race and development studies, which was prominently explored in a collection of papers on race and racism in the journal Progress in Development Studies back in 2006. This revival is timely in the context of a global call to decolonise higher education. Given the central logic of race and racism in European colonialism, and the decolonial argument that colonialism continues in the production and value of knowledge, I examine the presence and absence of race and racism in discussions of decolonising higher education and in development studies. Through a systematic review and content analysis of papers published in six major development studies journals over the past 13?years, I identify where and how race is present in current development scholarship and explore the implications of this for a decolonial turn in development studies.     

New Labour,racism and ‘new’ football in England

ABSTRACT

Bradbury and Williams begin by examining aspects of the genealogy of incidents of fan racism at the Spain v. England international football match in Madrid on 17 November 2004, and the public outcry in Britain that followed. They raise questions about the possible ‘strategic mobilization’ by Spanish fans of apparently racist epithets as a response to the use, by the English football authorities before the match, of prominent anti-racism symbolism. The main body of the article then considers the British public response to Madrid within the context of the Blairite New Labour policy on football racism in England from the late 1990s. It argues that Labour's Football Task Force from 1997 constituted an entirely new direction for sport and government policy in Britain. However, by drawing on the comments of some of the key figures involved, Bradbury and Williams further contend that, both structurally and ideologically, the Task Force was preset to limit its own investigations on the nature and effects of racism, specifically in the English game. Although the Task Force's report, Eliminating Racism in Football, has had some positive effects—for example, on Football Association policy or in stimulating local anti-racist initiatives—its narrow focus and its relatively underdeveloped understanding of the racism problem in professional sport led its members to de-emphasize the significance of forms of institutionalized racism within English football. Research and commentaries on racism in the English game since that report was published in 1998 suggest that problems of racialized exclusion in football remain. Bradbury and Williams conclude that the public outrage in Britain about the incidents in Madrid reflect an over-concentration on silencing public expressions of racism—combating overt, collective fan outbreaks—at the expense of addressing the racialized structures of power that continue to shape access, opportunities and acceptance of ethnic minorities within professional football in England.     

Book Reviews

This article examines East European migrants’ relationships with other communities in the context of waged work through in-depth interviews with recent Polish and Lithuanian migrants to London. These migrants found themselves newly surrounded by greater racial and ethnic diversity. By distinguishing themselves from other workers on the basis of skin color and legal status, they present themselves as members of the host country's ‘white’ majority, which places them in a position of power in relation to other migrant groups in London.     

Conciliatory whiteness: white farmers’ accommodations and responses to land reform in Matabeleland South,Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to contribute to growing academic literature on land reform and whiteness in Zimbabwe, where there have been calls for nuance in the analysis of agrarian change. The research which underpins it explores differentiated responses to land reform on the part of a sample of white farmers (as well as A1 and A2 beneficiaries), in the environs of Matobo district, Matabeleland South, Zimbabwe. It characterises a range of responses on the part of white farmers – dropping out, pushing back, accommodating and adapting – and charts the various outcomes of these strategies. I further utilise the concept of subjectivity to reflect on these diverse responses and to disaggregate essentialised or homogenised understandings of whiteness. The article focuses on the small number of white farmers who retain a connection to the land and agrarian production in the study area and argues they embody aspects of a particular subjectivity. This conciliatory subjectivity is characterised by openness to reconciliation, rapprochement and partnership-making. Specifically, it is located along the following lines: (1) in contrast to the perceived ‘islands of privilege’ of some of their peers; (2) within a challenging context where they no longer occupy a hegemonic position; (3) wherein they are inclined or required to (re)form collaborations and alliances in the new dispensation; and (4) the subjectivity of these farmers could be said to be pre-occupied less with issues of identity and belonging, than with surviving and ‘becoming’ amidst the multi-faceted challenges of contemporary Zimbabwean rural agricultural endeavours and socio-political life.     

Property and whiteness: the Oregon standoff and the contradictions of the U.S. Settler State

On 2 January 2016, armed anti-government protestors took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge (MNWR) in rural Oregon. The takeover of the MNWR is part of a larger, much longer set of movements called the Sagebrush Rebellion that has come to define contemporary white contestations about the federal regulation of lands in the American West. Specifically, we argue that the armed takeover of MNWR is revelatory of the way white supremacy intersects with place in important and consequential ways. In addition, we examine the politics of place and property to interrogate the way settler imaginaries affords settlers a perceived right to property and the land. We contend that this perception, illustrated by the events at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, is enmeshed within particular conceptions of property, the frontier, and whiteness. The MNWR takeover illuminates how discourses of whiteness and property rights are essential to the ongoing production of white supremacy within the US settler state.